Thor: "Behold... the Living Planet!"

Thor #133 (1966)

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Vince Colletta

Background: Thor and the Recorder have travelled into the mysterious Black Galaxy on behalf of the Rigellians. There, they have come face to face with Ego, the Living Planet.

So, What Happens? Thor and the Recorder are astounded at the gigantic sight of Ego, the Living Planet, who's capable of showing a humanoid face and of talking to them. Landing on the surface, they see something similar to enormous living cells and realize that Ego is indeed a planet-size living being. Wanting to talk to them, Ego probes their minds for a familiar surface and then changes the environment around them into something resembling and Asgardian forest, where he appears as a knight. Thor and the Recorder realize that Ego is capable of reshaping matter as he wishes, and that his power is also limitless. The Living Planet intends to conquer space and wants to test himself by beating someone as strong as Thor while in human form. He proceeds to create an army of human-shaped antibodies to battle Thor, who manages to travel under the surface but has to contend with both the antibodies and the ever-shifting environment. Eventually the Recorder is almost destroyed, but Thor saves it and hits Ego with a "universe-shaking thermoblast", a thunderstorm powerful enough to damage even the Living Planet. Conceding defeat, Ego allows the two foes safe passage and promises never to threaten the rest of the universe again. Successful, Thor starts the journey back to Earth.

Notes: The story is only 15-pages long to leave space for the Tales of Asgard backup tale.

Review: It's easy to link Thor only to mithological adventures throughout the Nine Realms but in truth, during Marvel's early years, the Odinson was a space explorer almost as much as the Fantastic Four. Long before the new X-Men or the original Guardians of the Galaxy, when most other heroes were fighting thugs, supervillains or Communist leaders, it was Thor who learned the story of Galactus origin, faced invading space armies, met the future Adam Warlock and contributed to defining the nascent Marvel intergalactic universe. This was faithful to Lee and Kirby's original vision for the character, whose world since the very beginning has always been a combination of science and mythology. It's no coincidence that Thor debuted against alien invaders, or that Kirby will later recycle many of his ideas from Thor to create the Fourth World over at DC.

In this sense, Behold... the Living Planet! is a classic Thor tale. What's groundbreaking is Ego himself, the concept of a living, thinking planet deserving the definition of "most daringly imaginative saga" given in the opening page. Having created gods, monsters, mutants, cosmic entities and a planet-eater, Stan outdoes himself here and gives Ego unique powers and a personality that is arrogant and detached at the same time. The same creativity applies to the art: it would have been easy to make Ego look goofy or cartoonish, but instead Kirby goes for the hyperrealistic and Ego's facial traits are so detailed we could be looking at a purple portrait instead of a comic book character. As such, it's not surprising that the original idea was a team effort by Stan and Jack, with Kirby coming up with the more specific details. According to Wikipedia.

I began to experiment ...and that's how Ego came about. ... A planet that was alive; a planet that was intelligent. That was nothing new either because there had been other stories [about] live planets but that's not acceptable. ... [Y]ou would say, 'Yeah, that's wild,' but how do you relate to it? Why is it alive? So I felt somewhere out in the universe, the universe ... becomes denser and turns liquid — and that in this liquid, there was a giant multiple virus, and if [it] remained isolated for millions and millions of years, it would ... begin to evolve by itself and it would begin to think. By the time we reached it, it might be quite superior to us — and that was Ego.

Unfortunately, great as the premise is, the creative spark doesn't quite extend to the rest of the story, and it looks like Stan and Jack have trouble handling the enormity of the character they have created, struggling most of all to find a logical way to make Thor win against such an overwhelming foe. In the end, they kind of fail as Thor pulls off a never-seen-before thermoblast, which is basically a convenient Deus Ex Machina to make Ego concede a fight he had been dominating. Giving Mjolnir all sorts of new powers to save the day is a recurring plague of Stan's otherwise great run, and while serving its purpose here, it also looks a bit like a lazy cop-out. For his part, Kirby struggles too and not all panels depicting the surface or inside of Ego are equally successful at convaying its alien nature.

Final Verdict: A great premise, but ultimately the execution doesn't quite hold up. 4/5